Austin: Too wide of the marque

Austin's grand 3-litre experiment is a cautionary tale: never put a cheap label on posh goods

If you want to understand the Austin 3-litre - near forgotten now and a rare bird even when it was still in production - you have only to consider the case of the Volkswagen Phaeton. A huge great barge of a car, designed to lure "executive" buyers away from their customary premium brands, but doomed to failure because it bears a humble "mass market" badge.

Nowadays, the Phaeton competes with its in-house sibling the Audi A8 (they are mechanically virtually identical), the BMW 7 Series and the Mercedes-Benz S-Class. Or rather, it doesn't, as, for all its virtues, the Phaeton just doesn't sell, even if the Pope recently took delivery of one. It's a familiar tale.

Forty years ago, the big Austin set out to beat the likes of Rover, Triumph, Mercedes and the larger offerings from Ford and Vauxhall (the Zodiac and the Victor). But it failed. It sold far fewer than expected, with about 10,000 produced in its three years of manufacture, until they gave up in 1971. It was, thus, the last large car to wear an Austin badge.

The reasons why it failed are not hard to find. Just look at it. Whereas its predecessors had been elegant, classy machines, this was a fairly undistinguished affair. The main problem was its styling. Even by this stage, the British motor industry was running out of cash and development funds were starting to become scarce. So the accountants told the engineers to design a car using the doors and other bits from the ungainly Austin 1800 model, which was introduced a few years earlier and was nicknamed the "land crab".

It certainly wasn't much prettier than the average crustacean, and it, too, had proved a bit of a disappointment. The Austin 1800 had lots of space; it was, if you like, a very big Mini, having been designed by the same man, Sir Alec Issigonis, and with a similar utilitarian approach - minimal styling plus a wheel at each corner and a transverse engine, making the interior very airy indeed. It was the almost willfully unappealing exterior of the car that was the problem.

In prosperous mid-Sixties Britain, the average buyer was looking for a little more style. The 1800 sold far fewer than it ought to have, and was probably the beginning of the end for our home industry, although there were plenty of other catastrophes to come.

Such as the Austin 3-litre, for example. Building on the Austin 1800's unprepossessing looks to create something as dashing as a Triumph 2500 or as dignified and majestic as a Rover 3.5 saloon was never going to be an easy task. And it was surely beyond the capabilities of the British Motor Corporation.

They gave the car a longer bonnet, to accommodate that straight six-cylinder powerplant, and a bigger boot, to accommodate the inevitable sets of gold clubs. They made the interior as plush as they could, with the usual wood (but not leather) treatment. But those addenda simply made it look even more ill-balanced, with a wheelbase too short for the overall length of the car. Why would anyone buy that?

It was nearly a very different tale, however. Difficult as it may be to believe now, in the early 1960s, Rolls-Royce was looking to the British Motor Corporation for help. In those days, the aero engine and car manufacturing were two sides of the same business (they separated in 1972 after Rolls-Royce went bust). Maybe the car side of things was non-core, maybe cars were getting expensive to develop, but for whatever reason, BMC and Rolls-Royce went through a period of intense collaboration.

The fruit of this venture, oddly enough, was to be a new product entirely, one that could either be seen as a large premium saloon or a small luxury limo. The Bentley Java was to use the elderly Austin Westminster body as a base, but adding a traditional Bentley grille (Bentley having by then long been a Rolls-Royce brand) and other tasteful styling cues. This baby Bentley was to use a modified Rolls-Royce military 4-litre engine, and have the usual top-end accoutrements, but would be much more compact than any Bentley or Rolls-Royce since the war.

Like the Vanden Plas 3-litre it was based on, the Bentley Java looked very graceful indeed, and might well have proved an aspirational, exciting product, especially in the export markets BMC was finding increasingly difficult to capture (apart from its MG sports cars, that is). It might well have sold exceptionally well in the United States, for example. The downsized Bentley was clearly very much ahead of its time.

Nowadays, we're used to having the likes of the Mercedes-Benz A-Class, the new Volvo C30 hatch and the BMW 1 Series bending our ideas about what prestige badges are "allowed" to do. Indeed, it is only a couple of years since the modern Bentley Motors company introduced its own relatively modest Bentley saloon, the Continental Flying Spur, a four-door version of the hit Continental GT coupé.

Now here's the funny thing: that Bentley owes a good deal of its engineering to the unloved Volkswagen Phaeton, as well as the Audi A8, the VW Group having taken control of Bentley after 1999. How strange that such a similar concept should have been tried, and failed, 40 years ago.

Had BMC and Rolls-Royce continued their collaboration, they might have had such a hit on their hands that they could have extended the range down to making a less plush, "badge-engineered" Austin version, that would have looked and gone an awful lot better than the 3-litre that eventually emerged. Their joint work staggered for long enough that something like a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce cousin of that car were worked up into prototypes, but by then the momentum had deserted the project.

Rolls-Royce bequeathed BMC the 4-litre engine which went into the Vanden Plas 4-litre R, and the suspension which went into the Austin 3-litre. Rolls-Royce went ahead with its Silver Shadow, and its badge-engineered counterpart, the Bentley T1. They both were a little reminiscent of the Project Java designs. The two companies went their separate ways, and both eventually ended up in German ownership.

It was probably unstoppable, that decline, but had that collaboration of long ago worked as its participants hoped, at least we would have had a classic small Bentley to be proud of. Instead, we got a very unclassy big Austin, that no-one wanted to claim responsibility for. Pity.